World

WASHINGTON: The lure of the massive Chinese market has led Hollywood to readily self-censor its films to please Beijing, according to a new report by Pen America, an anti-censorship group. Screenwriters, producers and directors in the huge US film industry are changing scripts, deleting scenes and altering other content, afraid of offending Chinese censors who control the gateway to the country's 1.4 billion consumers, according to the report released Wednesday. The actions include everything from deleting the Taiwanese flag from Tom Cruise's bomber jacket in the upcoming Top Gun: Maverick, to removing China as the source of a zombie virus in 2013's World War Z. But it also means completely avoiding sensitive issues including Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong politics, Xinjiang and the portr...

JAKARTA: Only last week Luhut Pandjaitan, Indonesia’s maritime minister and close confidant of the country’s president, touted herbal mangosteen juice as a coronavirus remedy. His suggestion was the latest in a string of unorthodox treatments put forward by the president’s Cabinet over the past six months, ranging from prayer to rice wrapped in banana-leaf to eucalyptus necklaces. The remedies reflect the unscientific approach to battling the coronavirus in the world’s fourth-most populous country, where the rate of testing is among the world’s lowest, contact tracing is minimal, and authorities have resisted lockdowns even as infections spiked. Indonesia has officially reported 6,346 deaths from COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, the highest overall toll in Southe...

BEIJING: Hong Kong will suspend an agreement on mutual legal assistance with the United States, China's foreign ministry said on Thursday (Aug 20), in a tit-for-tat response to Washington ending some agreements with Hong Kong. The US State Department notified Hong Kong on Wednesday that Washington had suspended or terminated three bilateral agreements with the semi-autonomous city following China's imposition of a sweeping national security law. "China urges the US to immediately correct its mistakes," foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a news briefing on Thursday as he announced the suspension of the agreement on legal assistance. The agreement, signed in 1997 before Britain returned Hong Kong to China, specified that the United States and Hong Kong governments would help ...

ISTANBUL: Turkey's new coronavirus cases jumped above 1,000 for the first time in three weeks on Tuesday (Aug 4) in what the government called a troubling rise during peak holiday season, raising concerns among top doctors about insufficient testing. Ankara, which lifted a partial lockdown in June and has lobbied hard for countries to allow tourists to visit, has called 1,000 a critical threshold to possibly reconsider rules. The 1,083 new COVID-19 cases reflect a "severe" rise after a four-day holiday weekend, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca wrote on Twitter, urging Turks to avoid contact and prevent vacations from having grave consequences. The virus has killed 5,765 and infected 234,934 in the country, putting it seventeenth globally based on total cases, according to a Reuters ta...

The California State Controller Betty Yee has called for the board of the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), the largest public U.S. investment fund, to launch an inquiry into the abrupt exit of its chief investment officer. REUTERS: The California State Controller Betty Yee has called for the board of the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), the largest public U.S. investment fund, to launch an inquiry into the abrupt exit of its chief investment officer. Yu Ben Meng, a U.S. citizen born in China, resigned from his position at the US$400 billion fund last week, saying he needed to focus on his health and family. In a letter sent to CalPERS' Board President Henry Jones on Monday, Yee called for a "swift and thorough inquiry" to determine w...